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The Hubble Space Telescope is still up there peering into the depths of space and putting out the most staggeringly beautiful images of the cosmos. It’s also doing some good science while it’s at it. That’s not bad for a 24 year-old scientific instrument. Hubble’s most recent triumph is a long-term survey of the distant Tarantula Nebula, which has been imaged in never before seen detail.

The Tarantula Nebula is positioned 160,000 light years distant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small satellite galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way. Within this small-ish irregular galaxy is the dense area of stars and gas known as the Tarantula Nebula. While it appears to be mostly gas in visible light images, there are actually over 800,000 stars within its borders. NASA researchers believe the extreme properties of this region of space could tell us about conditions in the early universe, hence the interest in getting to know it better.

Hubble used its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to acquire the new images of this nebula. The WFC3 is a visible light camera and ACS captures the infrared. Researchers are paying particular attention to an area of dense stars called R136, a super star cluster that outputs much of the light that makes the Tarantula Nebula visible from Earth. It is believed this feature could eventually evolve into a globular cluster made up of closely packed old stars orbiting a galactic core like a satellite.

These new observations of the nebula are being undertaken as part of the Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project, a long-term project to better understand this notable region of space. The new images will also be used in an upcoming ebook called Reach for the Stars: Touch, Look, Listen, Learn, which will be available for free on iPad.